]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=10900Understanding Thailand’s Persistent Crisishttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=939
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=939#respondThu, 16 Jan 2014 09:42:04 +0000http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=939I have a piece on the PSA blog today that explains the current protests in Bangkok.

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=9390Office Hours for remainder of 2013/14 and thereafterhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=851
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=851#commentsMon, 14 Oct 2013 08:36:13 +0000http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=851During the exam term I will not be holding regular office hours. Please email me for an appointment. From 1 July 2014 I will be on a year-long research sabbatical so I will not be holding any office hours until I return in September 2016.
]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=8513Monocle 24, 2 May 2013http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=765
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=765#respondFri, 03 May 2013 13:43:11 +0000http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=765My latest appearance on Monocle 24 can be heard here, about 45 minutes in. The events I discussed are:

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=7650‘ASEAN’s Unchanged Melody’ attracts interesthttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=634
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=634#respondSun, 24 Oct 2010 20:37:06 +0000http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=634My recent article in the Pacific Review on ASEAN’s non-interference principle has been attracting some positive attention. I’ve received quite a few appreciative emails from fellow scholars and the article has been picked up by the Centre for Non-Traditional Security in Singapore too. It has also been highlighted by the US embassies in Hanoi and Bangkok.
]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=6340Downtimehttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=616
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=616#respondSat, 17 Jul 2010 09:24:25 +0000http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=616My website and blog has recently been down for quite a long time. This was due to the apparent collapse of my previous hosting company. It took me a long time to get my hands on the files needed to reconstruct the blog in particular, but now things seem to be OK. Fingers crossed…
]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=6160This blog has movedhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=610
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=610#respondSun, 14 Mar 2010 21:14:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=264Due to Google/Blogger removing their support for people using FTP,* I have switched to WordPress, which means some changes to the blog on the technical side (thanks to Ben Pile for his help with this).

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=6100Oxford Panoramashttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=593
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=593#respondTue, 16 Sep 2008 16:25:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=244Seth Lazar, a colleague of mine at Oxford, has set up a company to sell his wonderful photographs of the city. Visit his website at http://www.oxford-panoramas.co.uk/index.htm.

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=5930Malaisehttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=552
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=552#respondMon, 15 Jan 2007 23:50:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=187I was quite struck by the revelation today that France petitioned Britain to enter into “union” during the Suez crisis. According to declassified documents, French Prime Minister Mollet asked Eden for political union, joint citizenship a la the “Irish model” and thought it would be “no problem” for the Queen to become French head of state. Eden ultimately refused, but apparently gave it serious thought and instructed his cabinet secretary that immediate consideration should be given to France joining the British Commonwealth.Of course, the media finds it hard to interpret what this meant because most journalists lack any sense of historical understanding, so the story has been presented as a rather weird tidbit like most of the stuff that turns up in the archives – but its meaning is far more significant than that.

What it illustrates very well is the exhaustion of the national form after the Second World War. France of course had petitioned Germany for a customs union in the 1930s, illustrating that the nation-state was no longer an adequate form for the expansion and well-being of French capitalism, and French conservatives fearing the pre-war election of the socialist candidate Leon Blum as Prime Minister adopted the slogan “Better Hitler Than Blum”. During the war, Jean Monnet, the later architect of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the EEC and EU, discussed a possible union with Britain during bathing sessions with Anthony Eden off the coast of Algeria.

Nation-states on the continent had literally collapsed after years of total war and occupation, leaving countries like France and Italy were teetering on the precipice of revolution. Western European states required massive American intervention to prop them up, in the form of occupations, forcible breaking-up of worker and peasant occupations of factories and land, the creation of Christian Democratic Parties to oppose the Communists and the manipulation of election results to establish their dominance, through to the Marshall Plan and NATO. What’s striking with this new revelation is just how long the instability of the national form lasted. France is often noted for its nationalism – but here we have a French Prime Minister petitioning for union with its erstwhile imperial rival and apparently willing to substitute the British monarch for the French president. It illustrates how desperate France was to retake Suez and stave off a collapse of the French economy and the war in Algeria.

France is also in the news of course because of the unopposed selection of Nicolas Sarkozy as the centre-right’s candidate for the French Presidency. The Guardian got it right when it pointed out that British politicians were projecting onto Sarkozy the sort of politician they wanted to see – someone who would reform France along Anglo-Saxon lines and break from Chirac’s “bankrupt neo-Gaullism”, and the FT also pointed out nicely that despite his neo-liberal rhetoric he has a record of protectionism and of pandering to xenophobia and French concerns about “globalisation”.

The press therefore seems to have got wind of the fact that it might not really matter very much at the macro level whether Sarkozy or his ‘socialist’ opponent Segolene Royale will win. Although the Times (typically) hopes that Sarkozy will provide “a sorely needed dose of Gallic Thatcherism”, the likelihood of that is close to zero. Sarkozy talks the talk – or at least, he did. He is famous of course for calling young ethnic minority men rioting against unemployment and poor housing “scum”, for attempting to push new contracts onto the young that would have allowed employers to dismiss them for no reason, perversely arguing that this would increase employment. And so when he promises “une rupture”, slavvering hacks at Murdoch Towers lick their lips in anticipation of the sort of open warfare that Thatcher waged successfully against the British working class in the 1980s. But wait! Sarkozy has already retreated before he’s begun, promising instead “une rupture tranquille”. Which of course is a contradiction in terms. Why the retreat? Because every time he has tried to push a neoliberal policy and take on the unions and affiliated groups, he has lost miserably because he lacks the backing of sufficient social forces. Which is why he now seeks to broaden his appeal, playing up the populist aspects of his platform.

But we shouldn’t believe that this means Royale would do any better if she were elected. The unions are strong enough to block neoliberal reforms, to defend their own economic position, but they lack the capacity to formulate a vision broader than that for all of French society, and the power to push forward such a vision if they had one. The unions excel at blocking government attempts at reform – indeed, their actual practices are exactly that – blocking – often taking the form of port blockades, mass demonstrations designed to bring traffic to a halt, or national strikes – but they lack the energy required to move forwards. French society is bogged down in a grim deadlock, a grinding balance of forces that won’t be broken at the next election.

Even if the unions did have a progressive vision for French society, with Segolene Royale at the helm it’s not obvious they could achieve a thing. She almost seems to be a reincarnation of Louis Bonaparte – the 19th century French emperor who came to power initially via elections, with absolutely no ideas of his own, which allowed the peasantry and petit-bourgeoisie to project all their hopes and dreams onto him. Take for instance this exchange with BBC News’s Europe Editor, Mark Mardell:

Mardell: What are your presidential qualities?Royale: That’s for the people to decide.Mardell: But you must have… qualities?Royale: That is for you to tell people about.

Vive la republique!

]]>http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=5520Saddam's execution: The Strip Tease of our Humanityhttp://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=551
http://www.leejones.tk/blog/wordpress/?p=551#respondSat, 30 Dec 2006 10:44:00 +0000http://leejones.tk/blog/?p=185Forgive the total absence of posting recently. To say I have been manically busy would be an understatement. As usual it is only the depths of outrage that drive me back to blogging. While many commentators are assessing the execution of Saddam Hussein at 6am Iraqi time today in terms of its likely effects on the insurgency in Iraq, what they ought to be criticising is the act itself.The images of a man being led to the gallows and having a noose tied around his neck were reminiscent of the public executions common in Britain in the nineteenth century, where bloodthirsty crowds would gather to watch felons despatched. They hark back to an uncivilised era that we thought we had transcended, and no amount of rhetorical distancing, such as that attempted by Margaret Beckett, will serve to wash the blood off our hands: the ‘Iraqi’ tribunal was a creature of the ‘Coalition’, albeit functioning through its ineffectual puppet government.And yet the images are also strikingly modern: a man, knowing he is about to die, is surrounded by other men whose faces are covered with balaclavas, and then killed, as the cameras roll. How does this differ from those familiar images we have seen – and which our government has condemned – on Al Jazeera television, of insurgent groups executing their captives?In normal circumstances the answer might be simple: as much as we might abhor the use of the death penalty, in a democratic society the laws are determined by popular will, and, due process having been followed, the defendant is tried by a jury of his peers and found guilty; the sentence carried out after the rights of appeal have been exhausted is the legitimate act of a state carrying out the will of its people.In the abnormal circumstances actually prevailing everything stands on its head. As a recent Human Rights Watch report indicated, Saddam’s trial was riddled with irregularities and corruptions so glaring that it can be regarded as no more than a show trial. The defence was not informed of the charges being pressed in the timescale required by Iraqi law; frequent Iraqi and American interventions undermined the impartiality and independence of the court, including replacing the chief judge twice until a man was appointed who had already opined that no trial was required but that a hanging would suffice; numerous violations of rules relating to the timely disclosure of evidence and other court documents; violations of the defendants’ basic right to cross-examine witnesses called against them; and conduct on the part of judges that displayed their total contempt for due process and impartiality. When Saddam’s lawyers tried to lodge an appeal against the verdict, they were initially blocked from doing so, and then leave to appeal was denied. I’m reminded of what the famous IR scholar Hedley Bull once said about the Nuremburg Trials – rather than bothering with the outward show of judicial process, we should have just taken them out back and shot them in the head.

As the former US Attorney-General serving as Saddam’s defence lawyer remarked, the trial was an ‘assault on truth and justice’ and the court-room ‘reeked of prejudice’. Its verdict was pre-determined and timed to coincide with the US mid-term elections – illustrated by the issuing of an oral verdict in the absence of a written verdict, which was not yet finished as the ‘good news’ was rushed out to meet the externally-imposed deadline. The parading of a prisoner, just as at the time of Saddam’s capture, before the cameras is another violation of the Geneva Conventions; and summary justice has been done by a puppet government unable to exert any authority beyond the green zone of Baghdad, ministers unable to even visit their ministries, by a government under foreign occupation. And we say, as Bush does, ‘justice had been done’, and, as Beckett does, ‘he has been held to account’.Whatever Saddam’s crimes, and they are probably legion, the barbaric spectacle of a show trial that Stalin would have been proud of and his execution by masked men at dawn in a shabby north Baghdad bunker brings shame on every citizen of every democratic country involved in the occupation of Iraq. Our moral authority, already broken, has now been ground beneath the heel of arbitrary judgement into a powder fine enough to blow away in a gust of wind. Jean-Paul Satre once commented of the French war in Algeria that the attempt to retain the colony and suppress its independence movement was ‘the strip-tease of our humanism’. In today’s misanthropic, anti-Enlightenment world, we have no humanism left. This trial and execution, which not only broke the spirit of every Iraqi and international law, but the basic moral injunction against injustice and the taking of life, was the strip-tease of our humanity.